The following update on what has been happening in the OpenAccess universe is mostly taken from the openaccessbutton blog.

Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, reviewed Dr. Erin McKiernan‘s talk from SPARC 2014, saying that, “After listening to her expression of such a heartfelt commitment … I began to realize that, in reality, OA is the only choice.”

Hebrew Studies is now open access with content after 1990 being made available through the Free Library platform.

MIT celebrates the fifth anniversary of their Faculty Open Access Policy. Readers regularly download MIT authored articles from DSpace@MIT. 38% of the access is from the United States, with heavy use from China, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Republic of Korea, Japan, and France, in that order.

The American Sociology Association Council has voted to launch a new open access journal called Sociology Open with their publishing partner SAGE. The news has been met with an interesting discussion and criticism about the partnership and the possible “cloning” of the open access sociology journal Sociological Science.